Judicial Committee Meeting Transcript – 02/26/2019 Title: City of Austin Description: 24/7 Channel: 6 - COAUS Recorded On: 2/26/2019 6:00:00 AM Original Air Date: 2/26/2019 Transcript Generated by SnapStream ================================== [2:08:03 PM] . >> Flannigan: All right, I think we're ready to start, my name is Jimmy Flannigan, we are in the boards and commissions room at city hall. As we get this meeting started, first item is approving the minutes from the meeting in August. >> So move. >> Flannigan: All right. Motion from Casar, seconded from Garza, without objection, that is adopted. I don't know that we have any present speakers. A couple I know, Mr. Pena signed up, I do not see him in the room. We can move forward on to item no. 3 related to goals for the municipal court. Go ahead. >> Good afternoon. Can you hear me? I am Mary Jane [indiscernible] The court clerk with Austin municipal court. >> I'm Peter Valdez, the court administrator for the community court. >> Back in 2017 the resolution was passed outlining eight goals for the municipal court that required certain metrics. We identified the metrics that we're going to cover during that timeframe. In addition, the city has engaged in the activity of identifying metrics for the strategic direction 2023, so I'm also going to talk about those as well. Just know that those were identified after the resolution. All right. So goal no. 1 is to provide prompt, effective, efficient and impartial administration of justice and processing of all cases filed with the court. If you look at the -- at the [2:10:04 PM] first graph to the left, this is going to be -- well, I'm sorry, excuse me, this is one graph. This graph talks about all of the cases that are documented. So -- docketed. We have the number of cases docketed, excluding the jail dockets excluding when people are arrested and [indiscernible] The booking facility. That's in purple. We have the total number of cases don'ted at dacc -- docketed at dacc in the light blue. The number of cases magistrated and arraigned in green. We have the percentage of all cases set on our docket within 60 days. That's only for AMC. What that measure is about, when someone pleads not guilty and requests a trial, that's -- they are set on the trial docket within 60 days of pleading not guilty. So you can see that the number of cases docketed for both AMC and dacc has -- has dropped. What's interesting in this is that -- is that even though our total caseloads have fallen, you can see that the -- that the number of cases that are being magistrated or arraigned are -- remain fairly consistent through 2014 through 2018. Also, another -- another point to note is that the percentage of cases on our docket within 60 days, even though the caseloads have decreased, so has that percentage a little bit from 2017 and 2018, you can see that it fell from 98% to 97%. The reason for that in the 2017 legislative session there were new requirements about notices that we have to send and restrictions on cash bonds. That has resulted in many cases getting reset multiple times. So the percent of them getting set on the docket within 60 days has fallen just a little bit, but we are still at 97%. >> Flannigan: Can you -- the dropoff on the downtown court is really dramatic. [2:12:05 PM] Can you explain that? >> Yes. There's a couple of factors. We met -- starting in 2016, we -- we met with A.P.D. About that decrease and some of the responses they gave us then and again last year was that they had less overtime fund or no overtime funds. Several officer vacancies. They were not maintaining quality of life which [indiscernible] Of class C misdemeanors. Then in 2016, they were -- they were due to the department of justice, they were holding off on -- on city ordinance violations related to homeless individuals. Then last year as it relates to the city audit. So really the decrease, a lot of the decrease is around the -- the city ordinance violations. >> Flannigan: That's a pretty dramatic -- >> Uh-huh. >> Flannigan: -- Shift. >> So on a positive side, we have increased outreach from the case management perspective, so that also affects people's compliance in our jurisdiction and I don't know if you are familiar with the downtown Austin alliance and their ambassador unit, they also focus on getting people to comply voluntarily. So that has also -- we think has also affected the decrease in the cases. >> Is there a metric that speaks to -- >> To that? To that shift? >> Flannigan: I see tickets and by definition that's the cases, right? That goes down. Much then there's some other metric that's popping up. >> So the other metric that's popping up is we continue to get a lot of voluntary requests for case management. So that speaks to that as [2:14:05 PM] well. We get walk-ins, plus we're on the host team, so the host team is also funneling people to us for voluntarily referral to programs. And then we do our own outreach as well through these homeless encampment cleanups. Our teams are going out there prior to the encampments to -- to offer services to individuals. >> Flannigan: I will let you keep moving through the presentation, I imagine there's a slide that will help me understand that, I'm seeing it, I'm looking at it. >> Goal no. 2 is to provide accurate, readily accessible information through multiple channels to the public and to all individuals participating in municipal court cases about the court's procedures, the rights and duties of defendants in cases before the court, and alternative sentencing options that allow individuals to resolve their cases when they cannot afford fines orosts. So we do have this information in multiple areas. As you can see on our website, there's ways to handle a ticket. Each one of those links goes into different areas and also talks about our programs and services. On almost all of our notices, it's got information on your rights and responsibilities if you are unable to pay. It gives the walk-in docket information, gives information about community service, lower payment plan amounts, extensions. Of course, that information is posted in the court clerk's, as well as judicial staff, inform the public about that. The bottom chart there is just the percent of time that our case management system is online. Obviously it's important that we have our case management system online for individuals to be able to process cases and to give people information that's specific to their cases. .>> Casar: How often is our system not online. >> Actually, it's been online 100% for the last five years with the exception of fiscal year 2016 it was at 99.82, so [2:16:07 PM] almost all of the time. >> Casar: Okay. That's helpful. That's helpful for me to know. And I did have a quick question and comment on the [indiscernible] Whenever we get back to the topic. But to me -- on the conversation about how many cases it is that we have, I think that it is interesting and helpful to see that child class C cases running through the courts go down, we haven't seen, you know, big upticks in, for example, violate crime and other significant issues. So I think that -- that's important for us to note. But then the metrics that you use on how often cases are docketed, that -- a case being docketed doesn't necessarily mean that it is closed or closed out or cleared. To me, the -- the question of making sure that we are providing swift administration and fair administration of justice might mean that we want to -- I haven't heard complaints, that cases are sitting around in municipal court for T long. But just like I obviously haven't heard complaints that the online system has been done, because it's been up 100% of the time. If we are going to be measuring something, it seems to me not just how quickly it is docketed but the average amount of time for a case to clear or how many cases that we have that take more than X amount of time to be closed maybe a more useful or an additionally useful measure so we are not just talking about an activity of docketing a case, but actually measuring how often we have old cases sitting around or how many days old cases that we have. >> That is actually in sb no. 5, later on in this presentation. When we get to that slide, I think that will answer most of your questions. >> Casar: Thank you. >> Goal no. 3 is to minimize jail commitments for non-payment of fines, whenever effective alternatives are available. [2:18:08 PM] We just started collecting this measure in 2018. Prior to that, we knew how many people were arrested but we didn't know what they were arrested for. A lot of people are arrested on higher level charges, they may have class cs but they are arrested and jailed on higher level charges so we weren't able to to split that out. 2018 we started collecting that information, let's walk through this. Quarter 1 of 2018 purple represents the number of people arrested only for class C. No higher charges. Actually purple represents fiscal year '18. So you can see in fiscal year -- for quarter 1, fiscal year of '18, 936 people were arrested for class C charges only. Of those 936 people, only four were remanded for those class C's, which is .42%, a very low percentage. I'm not going to walk through each one of these unless you would like me to. But you can see throughout all of fiscal year '18 and the first quarter of fiscal year '19, which is represented in Orange there, the percentage of people who are arrested on class C's, it's less than one percent of those individuals who are getting remanded to jail. So fiscal year '18, all year there was eight people. Fiscal year '19, so far, it's been one person. Any questions about that? >> Casar: Please. So when someone is arrested on, say, a class B or a class a or state jail felony or whatever and they also have class C's, if they are let out on -- on pr bond or whatever for the higher level charge, but then remanded for the class C for a day or two, is that captured in this information? >> That is not captured in this metric because this is only for class C's, we do have that information. I can get it for you. >> Casar: Help me idea why we would measure this, not measure that. [2:20:08 PM] I'm just trying to understand in the end we are trying to measure for our activity. What are we remanding people for. Why would we measure only class C's without owe charges as opposed to being remanded for a class C but you have otherharges? >> Well, we do have that metric. I'm just saying I didn't report it here. I can report that to you, though. >> Casar: No, no, it's great that you track it. I'm not -- what I'm asking is I -- it seems to me that could be useful from where I sit. But I don't know if on y'all's end you are like actually, Greg, it's more useful for us to measure this and not measure that because something. >> The reason that we did it like this is because there was a lot of criticism and miscommunication within the last few years because of the way that we were reporting. And we didn't have a way to separate them out. So it was very important at that time to be able to say the number of people who were remanded to jail only on class C because the number was skewed. If they were being held for a higher charge, a lot of times they will go ahead and give them credit time served for their class C, which looks like they are actually sitting it out. That's not what they are being held for. They are just giving them credit for the time that they are already staying. We felt it was important to break it down and really show of class C's, it's a very, very small percentage of those people who are actually being held. But again we do track the other number. I'm not going to guess what that is. But I can guess that number for you -- >> Casar: To me it would be useful just to know how often we are remands people, to know the number of remands for class C's whether you have other charges or not. Finally I think it would be helpful to know how long it is, how many folks are we remanding for a day versus two or three days versus four or more days or whatever that is. Just because I think that would provide a level of [2:22:10 PM] clarity. But what it is that we are talking about. >> Flannigan: I think what I am hear, Mary Jane, if you -- that there's a difference between the statistics showing remanded for class C which it's time credited because they were also remanded for something else, versus only the class C was the reason. Trying to parse that out, if that's a number. >> Right. >> Flannigan: Or is it one person and almost statistically insignificant at that point. >> So I do want to speak to one of your comments. You had mentioned how long they are being held. That is useful information. We're not going to be able to capture that with our current case management system. There's not a field to capture it. Hopefully that will be something that we can capture with a new case management system, but we are still about two years out on that. I will check into it. I know there's severe limitations so we might not be able to do that part of it immediately. >> Casar: I understand. We've got old tech. I appreciate you checking to see if there's a fix or not. I think we're saying the same thing, chair, where if somebody is remanded only because of a class C but they have higher charges, they are still not popping up on this. That is interesting, not on here, but sounds like it's being tracked so that could be useful. Okay, thank you. >> Goal four to make alternative optioning sentences available whenever appropriate under the law and ensure sentencing is consistent with all federal and state law restricting jail commitments. Do you want to talk about -- >> Regarding community courts numbers, this is reflective of all of the rehab sentences an community service sentences that are given out by judge coffee. The light blue number is specific to frequent offenders, we specify that because that's our priority populations, the individuals [2:24:10 PM] that are getting the most citations in our jurisdiction. So we focus a lot of our resources on that population. So, again, the -- this is reflective of all of the hours of csr that are scheduled. Completed would be frequent offenders and rehab are the hours that are scheduled as well. >> Flannigan: I find this chart is very difficult to read because of the scale. And, in fact, in some places the label for the number is lower even though the number is higher in relation to another bar. Like the hours scheduled at dac in '14 versus '15, it looks like it's lower. I think we have a visual representation issue in this chart, it's very hard for me to use this as an analysis tool. >> I will correct that on a go forward basis, judge coffee said the same comment when I walked in here. I did that because the blue column, which is the nr of cs hours scheduled at dacc was so much lower than the other two that you couldn't really see it [multiple voices] >> Yes. >> All right. And then the chart to the right is just for AMC. This is the number of cases set up on payment plans and extensions. That's the -- that's the purple column there. And then the percentage of cases set up on the payment plans and extensions. Which is the line. As you can see, even though our caseload is going down, the percentage of cases that are set up on extensions and payment plans remains relative consistent. The green column isase -- number of cases satisfied with partial community service credit or community service. We don't have any way, in our current system, to track how many community service hours are actually ordered. All we can track is how much was completed. So that number is really [2:26:12 PM] understated. Because if someone doesn't complete it, we don't have a way to track that. That will be fixed with our new case management system. I just put it on there to show you, that's all that we have, it's really insignificant and not representative of how many people are getting ordered community service on the AMC side. >> All right. You already answered one of my questions that's great. The other question that I have is with our current technology, are we able to measure about how long it takes people to complete what it is that we are ordering them to do? Because it is useful to know how often we are asking this of folks. To me I would want to know is it taking people two years to complete community service, that seems like a long time; or are they getting it done in three months? Is there a way for us to track on average how long it takes for somebody to complete what it is that we are asking them. >> There is. I think like Mary Jane said, on the future slides she'll speak about the average timeframe of cases active. For both community court and municipal court. They are different averages. >> Casar: How long it's active, though, could mean that their attorney, if they have an attorney, isn't showing up or they aren't showing up. For me on the community service side, is it possible, would it be useful, I'm open to of course maybe it's not useful. But is it possible and useful for us to know how long it's taking somebody from the moment they are ordered to community service to be done with our process? Is that something possible for us to find out and would be useful to know? >> For the AMC side it's not possible right now. It will be in the future with the new case management. I'm not sure -- since you are tracking the number of hours ordered now, I would think that we should be at query that to see how long from the time it was ordered to the time the community service was completed. We can look into that. [2:28:13 PM] We will not be able to do that on our side of the house at this point. >> Casar: Do you have a sense of how long is too long for somebody to wrap up what we're asking them to do and what the ideal amount of time is -- >> Because judge coffee takes into consideration factors that might affects how soon they can do it, I think our average is probably 180 days, is what the average is for a case to be resolved. >> Casar: Right, I think that could be helpful. Sounds like on the AMC side, that's why we need new technology and can start looking at it on the dacc side. Thank >> Goal positive is to minimize the issuance of warrants whenever alternatives are available and through imposition of alternative sentences. The top chart is for both AMC and dacc and just warrants issued. The only reason I included this graphic is I wanted you to see that the majority -- the blue line represents the percentage of warrants that are issued as a result of failure to appear, not failure to comply. So you can see the biggest bulk of our warrants are for people who are not coming at all, and if they don't come to court we can't offer them alternative sentences. >> Now, on the community court side, because we do acvely do outreach either through host our our own, that will address some of those warrants because they'll -- we'll ask them to come in voluntarily. Otherwise, if we can't find them, we -- it will stay active until they do come in or are brought in for another charge. One thing that is meaningful with the top chart -- or two things, actually, the second is that our caseload from the AMC side is down about -- excuse my, 35% over five years. The warrants I should issued [2:30:14 PM] is down 50% so it's not considerable. Comparability. The second charge explains that more. We just started collecting this in 2018. So you can see for quarter 1, 38% of our active caseload was in warrant status, any type of warrant, and it's gone down over the -- all four quarters of fiscal year '18 and then it's also the first quarter of fiscal year '19. So from quarter one to quarter four in fiscal year '18 that's a rate of change of about 8% so it is falling. And from quarter one fiscal year '18 to quarter one of fiscal year '19, it's 11% rate of change. So we are issuing less warrants, and it is -- they are less percentage of our total caseload. There could be several reasons for that. I wish I could tell you that it was because more community service was order, but I don't have that metric. >> Casar: So of all my questions, these -- in this area, I think, are the two that I'm most interested in, which would be are we able to measure the proportion of warrants resolved by arrest versus warrants resolved by people appearing? >> I think that would be captured in the remand numbers, wouldn't it? >> Casar: Or just generally warrants resolved by arrest versus warrants resolved otherwise. >> I'm thinking, yes, yes, I think it would be. I'll have to look into that. It's possible. I don't know definitively. I'll look into it. >> Casar: That would be very helpful. Either that's generally what y'all are talking about where we're trying to head, to figure out what it is we can do, how we can support the team and the city to get as many warrants resolved by means other than arrest. And are we able to measure [2:32:16 PM] the age of warrants, how -- you know, the average age of, you know -- you hear these stories of folks having had a warrant hanging out there for a really long time and then they apply for a job and realize they've got this warrant hanging out. Is there any way for us to measure how old an average our warrants are or if we decided an old warrant is something over four years old how many of those we have? >> So are you asking the average age of our -- the active warrants now or the average age of the warrant at the time the person resolves it. >> Casar: Active warrants. >> Yes, we can get that information. I will tell you that we do -- we administratively close cases and then purge them so if there hasn't been any activity, I think in five years, we'll administratively close those so the really old warrants, that's gonna be a very low number because most of those cases have been administratively closed if there wasn't been activity on them at all. >> Casar: Great. That seems less urgent. It might be good to know how many 3-5-year-old warrants we have but overall if we're administratively closing them at five then to me still of most interest is that first thing we talked about, how often are we ending a warrant with an arrest versus by other means. >> Okay. >> Casar: Thank you. >> Could any of that decrease be because of, like, the warrant amnesty things? Because that would affect the status if they go in during that time and take care of their -- >> Yes, yes. >> Garza: So it's a combination of less being issued and more people having the opportunity -- [ overlapping speakers ] Have -- I feel like, and I don't know, I feel like those have been offered more often. Is that true? >> I'm sorry. Can you repeat that one more time? There's rumbling over here. >> That's okay. Warrant amnesty periods, have y'all been offering those more frequently than in the past. >> No. We've been offering them once a year. [2:34:17 PM] We switched from warrant roundup to warrant amnesty in 2017, and right now we're just doing it once a year. This is the last week of it. It's typically around the February or March time frame. However, we are discussing doing those a couple times a year. >> Garza: Okay. But have you -- do you have any data on people using that more? >> I do not -- I don't have it included in this, but I do have statistics on the warrant amnesty from '17 and '19 and obviously I'll have them on '19 and I can share those. '17 I can tell you was very successful. '18, all of the metrics were reduced by, like, 60 to 70%, didn't do very well. And this year is pretty much in alignment with last year. >> Garza: Okay. Thanks. >> Then again remember that community court warrants if the person decides to come in because a case manager interacted with them in the field, we cancel the warrant. So that's also a factor. >> Goal six is to minimize unintended adverse consequences of class C fines and fees on low-income individuals and family. So this chart are the -- represents the numbers of cases in which fines, costs and fees were waived or reduced by an Austin municipal court or downtown community court judge. You can -- we have the stats all the way from fiscal year 12 forward. You can see big differences. It jumped from fiscal year '18 to fiscal year '17 and '18 about half a million dollars there. And that is due to the warrant amnesty events because that's about how many warrant fees we're waving during those periods, about a half a million. Quarter -- fiscal year '19 is only through quarter one. So that's, you know -- any [2:36:18 PM] type of fee that's waived or reduced and it could be the fine cost, state court cost or local fees, so our judges, I mean, you can see the number of cases that received reductions and/or waivers. You can also see the number of cases where indigitalsy was determined, and then the total amount of the reductions and waivers. In addition to that, we -- again, we are offering the warrant amnesty programs. We do that once a year. We're doing the driver's license recovery clinics, started that November last year, completed four so far. We're getting ready to do another one sometime at the end of March. We do those once a quarter. That's a partnership between us, UT law school and Texas fair defense. What that is is when individuals get convictions, a lot of those result in surcharges on their driver's license and then the dps, you have to pay the dps for the surcharges so a lot of people cannot get their license back so they come to these clinics. Then it gives them an opportunity to speak with a judge and if the judge determines that they don't have the ability to pay they'll waive the surcharges. That happens eveay at court, too. You don't have to go to one of these clinics. These are just typically outside of business hours and off-site, not at court. We do have the walk-in dockets. Twice a day, Monday through Thursday, for individuals that may be experiencing hardships, they can come in and see a judge without appointments. The hashedship dockets are specifically for individuals who have been arrested. For failure to pay their class Cs and it's an option for a judge to release someone's schedule on this particular docket if they have experienced they have experienced a hardship. >> Casar: It's -- all this information is really helpful, and I appreciate the chart. So it looks like it's something like $100 per case, more or less, waved because it looks like you [2:38:18 PM] could add a couple zeros to the dollar figure. A question from me is about how much of somebody's fine are -- is getting waived? Counting the number of cases where there is a waiver, it's useful and interesting and it's really interesting to see the change in numbers, especially after we worked on this issue and councilmember Garza sponsored the resolution, it seems like there was more attention to the issue, which I think is really important. I don't know if it would be helpful or if we could figure out more or less how much of people's fines are being waived. It is useful to know how many cases a fine is being waived, but I don't know if it would be useful to know which portion of people's fine. It looks like from this we're waiving about a hundred dollars a case and I don't know if that means in a lot of cases we're waiving all of it, some cases waiving some small portion and it averages out to a hundred or if we're just generally waiving a hundred, but if there's more information that could be, you know, of how often are we waiving half or more or whatever it is could be useful to understand. But this is already a lot of information and really great. I'm just curious. >> It would be good to know. Even from the public narrative around, are we -- did we waive a million dollars in fees or would we not have collected the other dollars had we not brought people in and worked with them around their situation? So that -- it's an interesting number. >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> I will definitely look into that. I'm not sure if we're able to do that right now, but that is something that we can capture in the future. Okay. Goal number 7 is to perform timely magistration at the Travis county central booking facility to minimize the time frame between a person's arrest and their opportunity to be released from detention. And when setting bonds, adhering closely to the minimum bond necessary to secure a defendant's presence in court and [2:40:19 PM] prioritizing release on personal bonds when possible. So there are several things in there, but the only thing that we actuay are able to capture and measure right now that is city of Austin data is the percentage of personal bonds compared to all bonds, the other bonds. So the other bonds would either be a cash or surety bond, and the purple columns represent the personal bonds. So you can see over the last five years that's the biggest bulk of the bonds that are being approved, you know, anywhere from 73% to 79%. In terms of how much time from the time of arrest to when they're magistrated, we don't have that data. I'm not sure if Travis county captures that. I have asked that question. I haven't received the answer yet. I will tell you the law states within 24 hours of arrest the individual has to be magistrated and we have seven to nine dockets at magistration per day so I'm guessing it's a matter of hours. Again, that's me guessing. I don't have the data to support that. >> Casar: Is there a way that we can know how well we're doing at that very question or is that just too hard for us to measure how long it's taking between getting those documents and being before a magistrate? >> Well, if it's being captured, it would be captured by Travis county. And, again, I'm working to see if they have that. I haven't received an answer on that yet. To be fair, I just asked last week so I will continue to work on that. But at the same time, I agree it's useful information but it's not anything that we control. That would be Travis county's metrics because we don't control the booking process and everything they do between the time they're arrested and the time that they're brought before the judge. >> Since we are paying for a significant amount of those services and since it is our appointees that are doing the magistration it could be useful for us to know, like, for example, if right now, you know, constitutionally you have 24 hours but let's [2:42:19 PM] say it's happening within three hours and we feel like that's good, it would be good for us to know that because let's say five years from now it's another set of councilmembers but now it's eight hours, then we could start asking questions about why it was three hours back in -- 2019 and now it's eight hours. If we can capture it it would be useful to know, even if it's not fully within our control we are the biggest chunk of cash into have that whole system run. >> Okay. Goal eight is to treat all people with respect and dignity and to create a culture of sensitivity to the diversity of income levels and circumstances of individuals residing in Austin. So the chart here is a level of customer satisfaction as indicated by the city of Austin citizen survey. And we're typically in the mid-80s on that. Our average is about 82%. We did fall to 79% in fiscal 2016. This is pretty straightforward, I think. You know, 80s is -- you know, that's pretty good, but, you know, not the best in terms of a report card. I'd prefer it to be in the 90, 95, but depending on that survey, it just depends to who the surveys go to and if they've had interactions with either court. >> Flannigan: I'm curious. Some of the city surveys it allows us to compare to other municipalities. It's challenging, in a place that nobody wishes they had to be. >> Right. >> Flannigan: To ask them the level of satisfaction with being in a place they wish they didn't have to be, it's always going to be a challenging metric. The change over time is a good one, but also curious if there are other municipalities to compare to. >> When they sent this year's results, they did have a statement in there, the overall satisfaction, [2:44:20 PM] not just talking about municipal court but overall citywide satisfaction was 68% and they said the national average is around 64. So I don't know that it will compare it to -- you know, in terms of municipal court satisfaction, but overall city satisfaction I think it does that. >> Flannigan: Yeah, right. >> Casar: On this where you talk about, you know, trying to respect folks different income levels and different backgrounds, is there any way to measure how much sort of at what level we're setting bonds, like how much -- I forget, I think the word is cash surety or whatever, we're asking for for people on their bands to go out, is there a way to track more or less how much we're asking for from folks to get out? >> Yes. I think that we -- that data would come from Travis county, but I believe that they do have that and we can get that information. Something important to -- let me go back to the bonds. Important to point out on this, these aren't just for class Cs. These are everything that our magistrates are doing, so a lot of these may be for higher charges, but I think that Travis county will have that information on the amounts of the bonds. I will definitely check into that. >> Casar: Yeah, that would be useful. Thank you. >> All right. The next slide definitely gets -- this gets into the actual sd23 performance measures that the council adopted. First one is percentage of people who report they were treated fairly during our enforcement and our judicial processes. Again, this is according to the community survey. So it's a little bit different than the slide before. The slide before talks about just level of customer satisfaction. This is actually the percentage of people who report that they were treated fairly. So you can see that municipal court for fiscal year '18 was at 63% compared to code compliance and police. The chart to the right shows [2:46:20 PM] that 63% of the people who had contact with municipal court reported that they were either satisfied or very satisfied. 23.4% were neutral and 13.5% reported they were either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. I apologize. This is the community survey is what the city has selected to use as the tool for this measure. I will tell you that municipal court has implemented an internal customer service survey. We did that July of last year. And our internal customers report 97% of them report that they were treated fairly. So the goal is to get cold -- code compliance and police are both looking into internal surveys and will once they just that we'll probably go to the internal survey rather than the community survey but the city wants to keep it consistent right now. >> Same applies to community court. We've also established our own customer survey. We started collecting that as of this fiscal year. >> Flannigan: I mean, I would -- you know, the challenge with a customer survey, internal customer survey, is the question of statistical significance and whether or not it preferences folks who are happy that fill it out or doesn't preference folks that were happy if -- I just went through a negative experience I'm not necessarily gonna tell you in your own document that I'm unhappy. Because I don't understand how that data is handled, necessarily or who is going to look at it or if my name will be attached to it, as opposed to the community survey, more disconnected from anyone's experience with the court. I'd want to think more about that and see more about survey design and the statistical analysis around it before we just move forward. And I think the same would apply to code compliance and police. [2:48:20 PM] I don't think we just went through what we went through to allow the police department to do their own surveys on their own satisfaction so I'd want to be thinking about that. >> Can I add a comment? The bad thing about the community survey is it reflects to the community court that you have to have an address to receive that survey and the majority of our clientele doesn't. >> And I would add that on the AMC side, internal survey, the comment cards, they don't have names on them and so -- it's not people going up to someone serving them. They're anonymous and people can grab them and put them in a dropbox. It doesn't resolve all your concerns, but some of them. All right. The next measure is number and percentage of instances where people access court services other than in person. For example, a kiosk, mobile application, online, or expanded hours. So we had between the two courts had a hard time quantifying this because we're so different. So from the AMC side, which is the right-hand chart, we did it just in terms of our operational hours that are outside of normal business hours, 8:00 to 5:00. You can see that in a total year our operating hours are 3,123 and about 29% of those are outside of 8:00 A.M. To 5:00 P.M. We're open at seven -- we're open 7:00 to 7:00 Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and we do that so individuals have time to come in before they go to work and after they get off work. Dacc measures this a little bit differently. >> Again, since the majority of our clientele is homeless, we don't do a lot of -- actually we don't do any business online. So what we've counted in our measure is correspondence cases for people that [2:50:21 PM] receive tickets that are from out of town and then are requesting to handle their cases through correspondence. We do have a percentage of those individuals that we serve. The other thing we're counting is the outreach. Because we're actually trying to serve people in the community through case management activities. We weren't tracking that until -- accurately until this year, actually, just a few months ago. So the number for this year should improve significantly. Because we're now tracking that. >> Flannigan: On the AMC side, is this chart capturing online interaction? >> No. This is just our operational hours outside of 8:00 A.M. To 5:00 P.M. We are capturing the online and we are in the process of adding that to this measure. But this is straight off the sd23 dashboard so it hasn't been added yet? >> Flannigan: I see. All right. >> The next is the number and percentage of court cases that are adjudicated within case processing time standards. So municipal court is on the left-hand side. The majority of our cases are adjudicated between zero and 90 days. In fact about 70% of all of our cases are adjudicated in the first 90 days. So when someone receives a citation they are given 20 business days, which equals about 30 calendar days, to come in and appear on that. So, again, the majority of our folks, 76%, are doing that between zero and 90. Dacc is a little bit different. >> Yeah. Again, the majority of ours are on average, 180 days or longer. And that's because of the population that we serve. They're gonna take a little bit longer to get to their completions, and they get -- they get more tickets as well. So it just -- that just affects the time period that [2:52:22 PM] something takes. So any time that they come in and they ask for extensions, judge Coffey is very accommodating to give them as many extensions as they need as long as they're compliant with their case manager. >> Councilmember Casar, does that answer your question from earlier? Okay. The last slide is number and percentages -- number and percentage of all cases granted alternative form of adjudication, for example, community service in lieu of monetary penalties for those not able to pay. This data is just for dacc, for the reason that I mentioned earlier, that we're not able to capture the number of individuals who are ordered community service. >> As you can see the majority of all of the business we do is alternative in nature. So we collect almost zero fines in our court. So the focus is to get people to comply in their community service hours. Judge Coffey this year, this year now gives credit of $25 for every hour of community service that they might owe. For example, if they owe $100 fine, they don't want to do rehabilitation but they'll do community service, he'll just assign them for hours and that takes care of the case. The other thing he does is he'll give anybody that's willing to participate in our work crews that we supervise outputs, community service work crews, he'll give them two hours credit for every hour they work. Again, they're able to address their fines faster. [2:54:23 PM] >> Okay. Last slide doesn't have -- it's not related to the resolution, but this is information that one of our many meetings about the relocation of the downtown southeast Austin -- some of the concern was for individuals who had public transportation. You guys asked us to look at how many people are taking public transportation. So we surveyed folks from July of '18 through January 2019, and of the folks who actually took this survey only 4% of them were taking public transportation. I have the breakdown of that 4% if you want to know which areas they're coming from. >> Not that much. >> So of the 4%, about 30% of them R coming from south, 35% of them are coming from north, 15% from east, and about 20% from central Austin. This differs a little bit with our jury survey. Our jury survey indicates about 10% of jurors take public transportation. This is customer service so this is Tommy the defendants who are at the -- typically defendants at the window taking that survey. Although I suppose a juror could pick up that comment card that I talked about and take it, but it's not likely. These are mostly. If you'll remember 96% of our cases filed are associated with either the ownership or operation of a motor vehicle so it's pretty much in alignment. >> Flannigan: Right. Any other comments on the metrics and goals? All right, thank you, all, for that. Now let's move to item 5, which is items that -- sorry, item 4, items that we'll see -- seek future council approval. >> Casar: Sorry when you asked this question I heard you saying on this last slide but I know you actually said on this entire item so did I have two more questions. First a comment, first, you guys obviously have worked really hard on getting this together for the resolution. [2:56:25 PM] And overall, I mean, really great stuff. And very appreciated and I think it will help not just with operations of the court but with our ability for folks in the future to look at how we've improved and where we've gone. My last question is really as it relates to sd1960 as we're trying to figure out how it is we best break down our metrics by equity. I know it's hard to break things down by demographics or other pieces of information but we are trying to get to a place where we can measure all of these things across equity metrics. But in my mind, for the court and for what council has been talking about, breaking things down by demographics and by whether somebody is represented by an attorney or not at the time of a judicial action seemed to me important things to break things down by. I know we may not be able to break everything down by that but even looking at, for example, if we can -- if somebody is arrested for a warrant versus if they deal with a warrant in another way, if there is a breakdown by demographics or break down by whether you had -- I guess in that case it wouldn't be an attorney but a breakdown in demographics in that case might be useful for us to see how representative it is one way or the other. Or same thing when there's, you know, remands to jail, if there's a breakdown of if you actually are represented by an attorney or not in that situation, how different does it look for you if you are represented or not and what the differences might be demographically for people remanded versus people not. I think that's part of what we're asking for across the city as part of sd23 so I think for the courts those two segments, figuring out where we can bring that in I think could be really useful for us. That's it. Thank you, all. >> Robert king is the community court's operations manager. He's also responsible for all our social service contracts, and that's what he's going to talk about [2:58:26 PM] today. >> Hi, good afternoon. Can I see the clicker? Thanks. I just wanted to give you -- >> Flannigan: It is on. I can barely hear. >> I'm theory give you a real quick overview of the items that we plan and/or there maybe a possibility to bring before council during the rest of this fiscal year and possibly next fiscal year as well. We have four items. The first one is actually an item that is on your March 7 agenda. And that's requesting your approval for new funding that came out of the if your '19 budget process that we have over at dacc for housing focus supportive services that be there to assist our case managers in helping their clients transition successfully from homelessness to housing. So we've gone through the solicitation process, evaluation process and identified four programs to add to our menu of service that's we currently offer, to permanent supportive housing, so adding 20 permanent supportive housing units to our investment portfolio. And outpatient treatment program, but we're going to be utilizing some funding for outpatient treatment to see how that could work with the clients we serve because, as you know, the majority are homeless, so it's difficult for somebody to successfully participate in a treatment -- substance abuse treatment program if they don't have safe and stable housing so we're seeing how we can bundle some things up with our existing services and also our permanent supportive housing program. Then our pre-- contemplated and precontemplated beds. So this is really focusing on individuals who are not yet ready to engage in substance use recovery services or behavioral health services. But just need some hopefully [3:00:28 PM] a safe and stable place to be housed and begin that transition process and then choose to actively participate. So we're going to utilize some funding for that. Then peer support services as well. This has been a really big initiative for the court that we're trying to invest in. We've been exploring multiple avenues internally. We were exploring that but it's just not working out with a lot of the systems that we have in place, as far as bringing on a peer support provider. So we were fortunate enough to have an applicant apply for that service to provide to our clients to help them in their recovery efforts. We're coming off of a funding cycle for services that we solicited approximately five years ago. So we're going to launch another rfa towards the end of this fiscal year and bring forward a request for council action based on that solicitation, probably the end of this year for contracts to start at the beginning of if your '19. It will be around $250,000 total. Going back to that first item, that's going to be a million dollar total investment between those four programs. The third item, and this is a tbd, just making -- bringing this and putting it on your radar, during the if your '19 budget process you all approved funding for the expanded crisis -- mobile crisis outreach team through integral care, really a partnership with our first responders. So we have an agreement with integral care in place to continue that service because it was at risk of going away because of the reduction in the 1115 medicaid waiver funding that integral care had. So it was 1-time funding. [3:02:29 PM] If that does come back to you all and you provide additional funding beyond if your '19 that contract currently sits over at dacc because we have other outreach contracts as well with integral characterization mainly through our host program. So it just seemed, like, a natural fit to sit in our department so we would of course bring that back to y'all. The las web-based work order platform, tbd as well. We're kind of in the research -- research phase. To help create efficiencies in our community service restitution program. So that's the work orders that we receive from other city departments for our work crews to go out with our volunteers and address. So last year we had addressed over 1800 sites, over 450 acres, we mitigated either through graffiti abatement, homeless camp cleanups we addressed and supervised over 27,000 hours from our probationers in those community service programs so it was a really big benefit to the city. But just due to the volume that spread out between those five to six work crews, it's difficult to manage right now in our current system, so we're looking at a more automated process, hopefully web-based platform that will help us receive work order requests, assign them, and then close them out and keeping the requests that are -- in the loop about that so they can can -- in turn communicate with the citizens that may have initiated that request as well. >> The work orders are coming mainly from Austin work source recovery and Austin code because they fund three of our crew leaders. So we prioritize those work orders. Then we -- the second priority is gonna be graffiti abatement in district 9. That's what we were assigned [3:04:31 PM] after the graffiti committee met and decided how they were going to address graffiti. And then, lastly, we're getting a lot of homeless encampment removal requests from either council, the city manager or A.P.D. So we'll do those as our third priority. But we get requests from all city departments at one time or another. >> Flannigan: Are there requests that -- are the requests that you're getting, are they all getting filled or is there a separate resource question about -- >> It's definitely -- I mean, the one we're having a hard time staying on top of and being respondent to are the encampment removals. We can do them. We just can't do them within a week's time frame. We have to coordinate -- >> Flannigan: There's a lot of other work going on concurrent with that so I wouldn't expect y'all to be the sole source of the solution there. >> Correct. If a work order is in an environment that's not safe for the individuals on the work crew, if it's in a hazardous area or in the watershed, we typically don't address those work orders or we'll address them in conjunction with watershed protection department because we just need them to be out there to kind of direct some of that work and let us know what we can and cannot do in that watershed-protected area. >> Flannigan: Great. Mary Jane, are there issues in the municipal court side? We had a couple items come to council we ended up kind of spinning around. This all sounds very good related to the downtown court but I'm curious if any contracts are coming back or new ones we should be anticipating. >> We don't V any new contracts coming to council for approval. >> Flannigan: Okay. >> The one that we discussed quite a bit last year was the scuff law program or the denial of the vehicle registration and we've decided not to bring that back because we participate in three programs, scuff law, omnibase, driver's license renewal and third party collections agency. We don't track -- there is no way of tracking of which [3:06:32 PM] one of those programs results in compliance. So we can't definitively say. In terms of scofflaw 2017 was the only year we didn't send cases and there wasn't a difference in revenue. Omnibase is autorenewed but we're going to do a analysis much in the way we did for scofflaw to determine that. We'll run into challenges with that because we won't know if compliance is a result of not being able to renew a driver's license offer the collection agency contacting them or people coming in on their own accord. >> Flannigan: All right. Thank you for putting this together. This is something that I think is really helpful for us, too, that we don't get caught off-guard as we try to unpack very complicated issues around the -- both of the courts. So thank you all for putting this together for us today. Let's move on to the -- item number 5 related to facilities. >> Good afternoon, excuse me. Alex Gail, interim officer for the office of real estate services. Today I wanted to give you all an update on the resolution passed in February of 2018. Just to highlight what some of those directions -- directives were from council, it was actually three directives from that resolution. One was to identify options, including leasing building and/or buying properties for the relocation of municipal court. Creating one regional facility serving the north and one regional facility serving the south. Item 2, develop recommendations for the future use of the municipal court site. Item 3, identify options for relocation of downtown downtown Austin community court. I wanted to give you a brief update of those through [3:08:33 PM] items as passed in that resolution. Quickly going through those three items, ite one, finding municipal court space on October 28 council did approve us to move forward with negotiation and execution of a ten-year lease with a ten-year option for 96,000 square feet of office space at 6800 Burleson and actually prior to that council had approved us moving forward with another space. Those negotiations fell through, and so we came back to council in October, which approved us to move forward with this alternate space, which was in the same general area of the met center space. The planned move-in is for the December 2019. It's looking actually like the end of December of 2019 for when that build-out will be complete and municipal court will be able to move in there. And that is a bit of a push from what we originally told council when we brought this item in October. I think we talked about June. And it slipped just due to some additional changes to that build-out that we've had the landlord do. Due to those changes it's pushed our move-in date for completion until that December date. And then the third item is the -- been looking for a north payment center. Currently, the payment centers at the north substation of the police -- north substation, and I think Mary Jane sent an email out to y'all today or maybe yesterday explaining that just due to the burden of the space that they're located in and A.P.D. Not being able to accommodate any expansion of that area, we have started to move forward with a -- looking for a lease space as a [3:10:34 PM] temporary space for them to occupy until we can do what council directed us to do, being both a south facility and a north facility. So that was item 1. >> Flannigan: Couple questions on this. The -- what is the process for moving forward on the north facility? Not the temporary lease space, which I understand is temporary lease space, but what is the time line on permanent north facility? >> So we have pushed that back just due to, you know, currently I think municipal court occupies 60 to 70,000 square foot of space in the current municipal court site and we've gone and leased 96,000 leased space in this ten-year space on the south side. So due to that, we think we can push back the need to go out and build or acquire a north space that would accommodate courtrooms and all those things outside of what I talked about just being the payment center. So I think we're several years out moving forward with a north basically station for the municipal court site. >> Flannigan: I want to be careful we don't delay the beginning of a process that we know is going to take two or three or four years in and of itself. >> Of course. >> Flannigan: I have some concerns about the timing of the closing of the south substation being so early in relation to the new south location opening and how that -- how did that get so out of sync? Because it's gonna provide interesting burdens. >> So in terms of the south substation, our lease expired back in October of 2016. And so we've been on a month to month since then. And we were waiting to find out what we were going to do with the downtown location before we did anything with [3:12:36 PM] that. We didn't want to rent another space. We weren't going to renew this -- the current lease at the south side because there's significant things that need to be fixed that the landlord is not willing to fix. >> Flannigan: Okay. >> We were going to go out and look for another south side space but then things started to fall apart at the downtown location so all that got put on hold so we haven't renewed the lease. It's just month to month. Our requirement is to give them a 60-day notice when we're gonna move out. However their reimbursement is 30 days. So they could kick us out with a 30-day notice and they show that quite frequently. So basically from day to day we didn't know if we were gonna have south suband we thought it was the more responsible decision to do a planned closure rather than waiting, you know, until they told us we had 30 days to get out. That's why we closed it. At the time that we made that decision we were waiting for the final -- for us to sign the lease for the downtown location to move to south east Austin Austin. >> Flannigan: I just think it's curious, given that the new facility down south is less than 12 months away, hopefully less than 12 months away, as I stare at you, Alex, that we wouldn't have just taken on that risk of the 30 day kickout. Is there something specific about us making this choice that makes it better? It just seems like we're gonna be burdening an already overburdened facility network in that there will just be one -- while we try to figure out what to do with north, it just -- >> We thought it was a better choice so we would have time to do a public relations campaign and let citizens know that we were moving out rather than, again, not even only having a 30- day notice and we spoke to council about this and the city manager and asked if there were any concerns, and there weren't any concerns voiced. So we -- >> Flannigan: I don't remember that conversation then. I don't remember it being in terms of -- my recollection was of the conversation around closing the south sub was it in concert with [3:14:37 PM] opening the other one, but I can go back and find those notes. On the north temporary space, what is the time line on that that we're thinking about? >> So we've just started that search. So it's just dependent on finding a space and being able to sign that lease. We're hopeful that there's going to be plenty of spaces up there, you know, whether it's in a retail strip center or something like that, the requirements that they're looking for in that payment center are not for a very large space because I think currently you're in about 120 square feet or something pretty small, so we think we should be able to fulfill that lease space pretty quickly. >> Flannigan: Are we including other public agencies that have facilities up there in that list of conversations? >> Yes, we're taking those into consideration. >> Flannigan: All right. Any other questions? >> One thing I would like to add is we would like to get a space, you know, obviously bigger than we're in now and, you know, that could be a small space to have dockets so we could put a judge and prosecutor out there. We can't do trials or anything like that. It can just be a temporary courtroom, doesn't have to be a traditional setting because this is a temporary space. But because we are moving to southeast Austin it would be helpful to have limited dockets in that area so individuals from the north don't have to drive to southeast. >> Flannigan: I'm curious if there are obviously conversations with JP, too, which has its facility 77 on burnet road, if there's opportunities to collaborate with them because I know the judge has done a lot of stuff linking services online and there may be interesting partnerships there. >> There may be an opportunity with the city of cedar park as well with their municipal courts. We're looking into that as well. >> Flannigan: That sounds very interesting. That would be very far away from everyone but me, but it does sound very interesting. All right. >> I'll move on to item 2, which is future use of the municipal court building. [3:16:37 PM] So I think we've relayed to you previously that we're working with our development advisor, cbre, who is performing an analysis of all our city-owned and leased facilities to provide recommendations on how we proceed with some of our -- utilizing some of our city-owned properties, assets, but also how, you know, our exit lease strategy as well that they're looking at. So we're expecting that report to come back to us in april/may of this year. And be able to report to the full council some of those findings basically of -- you know, looking at all our owned space and leased space, owned space in particular the A.P.D. Headquarters, as well as the municipal court building being, you know, that prime location right there next to the waller creek that's always been eyed as something to be used, you know, for future use as well. >> Flannigan: Good. >> Then item three, downtown Austin community court, as a group with a strategic facilities governance team we've met on how we move forward with this. And taking multiple options into consideration and so we've looked at possibly using current facility or facilities that we have going out and leasing space, building, or acquisition. I think based on those options that we've laid out there, what we've gone ahead and done is basically said we think that moving forward with a -- with an acquisition of a site is going to be our best path forward. Of course there's those specific requirements that have to be in a specific area of that downtown core and so we're gonna be working with pricing. That will be an issue, as well as finding the space that will work for the community court. But that's the path that we're going to move forward with. Right now we don't have a time line of -- we don't [3:18:38 PM] have a site identified, but that's what we're moving forward with, is understanding all the requirements that community court needs. If there's any contingent or collaboration that we can do with any other departments, that may need to be housed possibly with the community court, whether it's the homeless officer or -- you know, something along those lines that would make sense to basically house those two offices or departments together. But then going out and exploring what is out there potentially to be purchased for the community court. >> Flannigan: All right. >> And those are the three items that I wanted to address with y'all. >> Flannigan: Greg. >> Casar: Is there a budget in this year's fiscal budget to address the expanded lease space for the north substation? >> We have a budget of about -- I believe it's around 5200 that we're currently spending on the south sub, so that money is already allocated with the south sub the end of this month. I don't foresee us doing anything before the ending of this fiscal year but hopefully beginning of next if that's a possibility. >> The timing would probably push it until the next fiscal year in order to possibly get a build-out and a -- a site selected and build-out complete to when they'd be able to occupy the facility. >> Flannigan: Stay where we are on the north side for now is what you're saying? >> For now, yes. >> Flannigan: So we're not closing both of them right away. >> No. The north side is pretty busy. >> Flannigan: Yeah, and it's pretty striking I think the percent of cases being handled there when there's no court facilities or other facilities, and I'm looking forward to our beautiful future of two north -- a north and south location. Anything else? Thank you so much for this reporting on facilities. It's something that's really important certainly to me [3:20:38 PM] and I know to the council and something that hasn't been able to be fully addressed in many, many years. So faster is better. We'll see if we can push the envelope. I don't want to see us still in 2020 talking about the Bergstrom tech site. Let's get this sucker opened. Our last item is anything for future meetings. I don't know that there's anything substantieyond continued updates on the things we talked about today and we'll just monitor that to see if there's anything substantial and convene as necessary. We'll keep dates we have on calendar just in case so we can keep that reserved and at some point we'll be able to have councilmember Madison, in the future it will be good to have a full set of councilmembers. Without objection we'll close the meeting today. Thank you. [ Adjourned ]